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Cold War Evolution and Interpretations - DÉtente

Despite the aggressive U.S. militarism in Southeast Asia, and a brutal
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a new thaw in East-West
relations emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Détente (relaxation of
tensions) emerged as part of the cyclical pattern of Cold War history in
which periods of relative calm followed periods of bitter great-power
conflict. Kennedy and Khrushchev started the process in the wake of the
missile crisis, but both were removed from the scene with
Kennedy's assassination in Dallas and Khrushchev's ouster
in a 1964 Kremlin power shift. The new, hard-line regime of Leonid
Brezhnev aggressively pursued Soviet aims, including sending the Red
Army into Czechoslovakia to repress the "Prague Spring."
Although the Czechs had not rejected the Warsaw Pact alliance with the
Soviet Union, the Brezhnev Doctrine proclaimed that none of the East
European states would be allowed to vacate the communist camp.

Preoccupied with his foreign policy debacle in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson
made little progress toward détente, but his successor, Nixon,
was keenly interested in improved East-West relations. Nixon's
support for détente was ironic, since he had made his reputation
in politics as a fervent anticommunist, yet he would achieve a
breakthrough in the Cold War. The impetus for détente, however,
actually came from European leaders Charles de Gaulle, president of
France, and Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor. Bitterly opposed
to the U.S. war in the former French colony of Indochina, De Gaulle
excoriated U.S. foreign policy, withdrew France from NATO's
integrated military command, and met with Brezhnev in Moscow in 1966.
Brandt, a former mayor of West Berlin, pursued a diplomacy of
Ostpolitik
(Eastern policy), improving relations with neighboring East Germany.

Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, a refugee from Nazi Germany and a former
Harvard professor turned national security adviser, pursued
détente in part to prevent the Europeans from undermining
Washington's leadership. Nixon and Kissinger also hoped to use
improved relations to gain the assistance of Moscow and Beijing in
bringing an end to the Vietnam War without the United States suffering a
humiliating defeat. Nixon and Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet rift
with a "triangular diplomacy" that sought to play off the
great communist powers against one another to the betterment of U.S.
national interests. After Kissinger traveled secretly to Beijing for
talks in 1969, the momentum toward rapprochement (reconciliation) was
irreversible. During a dramatic state visit in 1971, Nixon clinked
cocktail glasses with Mao Zedong in Beijing and posed for photographers
atop the Great Wall of China. The next year the two powers issued the
Shanghai Communique, a joint statement that China and the United States
would strive to improve their relations and to contain
"hegemony," a euphemism for the Soviet Union.

The dramatic "Nixinger" summit diplomacy with the onetime
archenemy "Red" China wowed the American public and
created anxiety in Moscow. The Kremlin warned the Americans against
playing the "China card" but also received Nixon in Moscow
in 1972 despite the American mining of Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam,
where Soviet supply ships regularly anchored. The high point of the
U.S.–Soviet détente was the signing of the 1972 Strategic
Arms Limitation Agreement, known as SALT I. The treaty established
ceilings on offensive missiles and sharply limited destabilizing
defensive weapons systems, but it was more important as a political
vehicle for improved relations than for its actual achievements in
limiting the weapons of mass destruction. Nixon and Kissinger failed
completely in their quest to go through China and the Soviets to prevail
upon North Vietnam to accept an independent South Vietnam, which instead
fell in April 1975.

The momentum of détente began to wane in the mid-1970s. Nixon,
its chief architect, met his political demise in the Watergate scandal.
With the Soviet Union maintaining its hegemony over Eastern Europe,
sponsoring revolutionary movements in the Third World, and denying human
rights to many of its own citizens, American critics began to equate
détente with appeasement. In the southwest African nation of
Angola, the two superpowers backed competing forces in a raging civil
war. Cuban troops, viewed as Soviet "proxies," fought in
behalf of leftist rebels in Angola while the United States and China
supported the opposition. A Cold War battle also emerged in Ethiopia and
throughout the horn of Africa. Soviet and Cuban influence was confined
mainly to those two countries, as U.S. trade and diplomacy proved
advantageous in several other key African states.

Critics of détente advocated "linkage"—
linking trade, arms control, and improved relations with Soviet behavior
in world affairs and in the regime's human rights policies. The
Soviets bitterly resented this approach and any effort to influence
their internal affairs. They had left themselves vulnerable to such
criticism, however, not only by denying freedom of intellectual and
religious expression in Russia but by violating pledges to respect human
rights embodied in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Under this agreement, the
United States, Soviet Union, and governments throughout Europe
recognized current borders as permanent, thus in effect renouncing the
old U.S. Cold War depiction of Eastern Europe as a set of
"captive nations."

Jimmy Carter, elected president in 1976, advocated arms control but made
human rights the centerpiece of his diplomacy and criticized the Soviets
for their violations. U.S. relations with China continued to improve,
however, a process that culminated in 1979 with formal recognition of
Beijing at the expense of the longtime U.S. ally on Taiwan. The
Japanese, too, expressed dismay at not being consulted about the
dramatic shift in U.S. East Asian policy. Détente deteriorated
under Carter, who adopted conflicting policies that reflected the
conflicting advice he received from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, an
advocate of détente, and national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski, a Polish emigré who adopted a harder line toward the
Soviets. Carter himself allowed the SALT process to break down. Although
a SALT II treaty was negotiated, Carter never took it before the U.S.
Senate, where it faced rejection.

Two climactic events in 1979 destroyed détente and ensured
Carter's defeat in the 1980 presidential election. First, in
November a militant fundamentalist regime in Iran took over the U.S.
embassy in Tehran, holding fifty-three Americans hostage. Carter began
painstaking negotiations aimed at securing their release, which would
not come for more than year. Meanwhile, the United States appeared
helpless as Iranian radicals burned the U.S. flag and shouted
"Death to Carter" in daily rituals outside the embassy. In
December the Soviet Union launched an invasion of neighboring
Afghanistan, where the pro-Soviet government in Kabul had come under
siege. The Soviet assault seemed to confirm critics' charges that
détente had been a form of appeasement. Carter declared that
Brezhnev had lied to him and instituted a variety of sanctions,
including a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympic games in Moscow.

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